Joseph P. Lash

Joseph P. Lash (December 2, 1909 - August 22, 1987) was a prominent radical leader, who considered himself "a full-time revolutionary."[1] He became a close friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and later became her biographer.

Contents

Early life

Joseph Lash was born to Samuel and Mary Avchin Lash, in New York City, the oldest of five children.[2]

American Student Union

In 1935, Lash, head of the Student League for International Democracy (SLID), a Socialist group, engineered the merger of SLID with the National Student League, a Communist group. The resulting organization was the American Student Union (ASU), a Popular-Front group,[3] of which Lash was executive secretary during 1936-39.[4]

In 1937 Lash successfully solicited Communist Party funding for the ASU from CP boss Earl Browder.[5] Lash attacked those who criticized Stalin's bloody purges for "cast[ing] doubt on the integrity of Soviet justice"[6] and called Trotskyites "the syphilis of the working class."[7] In 1938, ex-Communist William G. Ryan, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, testified before the Dies Committee that the ASU was a "front" organization "completely controlled by the Communist party."[8]

In July 1939, Lash wrote that he was "ready to take out a C party card."[9] In the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact, at the 1939 ASU national convention, an amendment labeling Russia an aggressor was defeated, as was a proposal to put the question to a referendum.[10] The Socialist Party brought charges against Lash for collaborating with the Communist Party and Lash resigned from the SP, a move he wrote about in the official Communist Party organ New Masses. That December, the ASU ousted Lash.[11] In 1940, Lash co-wrote a book published by International Publishers, the official Communist publishing house. His co-author, James Wechsler, was a leader of the Young Communist League (YCL), a group that was fully subsidized by the CPUSA.[12]

Lash would later deny having joined the CP—calling himself a "non-Party Bolshevik"[13]—although he had been a May Day speaker.[14] "Joe Lash may not admit it today," said Gil Green, leader of the YSL during the Popular Front years, but while Lash was a leader of the student movement,"he joined the CP."[15]

Personal life

In 1935, when Lash was heading the SLID, an article appeared in Liberty magazine under the pen name J. G. Shaw, alleging that the SLID was a Communist front for college students, and that the male members occasionally seduced female recruits. "You can't afford to laugh at them—as I did," wrote Shaw, "and a thousand other fathers who see their daughters put on the road to Hell—too late." Eighteen-year-old Nancy Bedford-Jones responded to this article with one of her own, entitled "My Father is a Liar!" in the Communist Party organ New Masses: "The author of these slanderous lies is my father—H. Bedford-Jones... America's most prolific writer [who] has entranced millions of readers for two decades," she wrote. "How the Red-baiters and mudslingers will welcome this new angle! ... We call upon the youth of America," etc.[16] Shortly thereafter, Miss Bedford-Jones became Mrs. Joseph Lash.[17] But in 1939 Eleanor Roosevelt introduced Lash to Mrs. Gertrude Wenzel Pratt,[18] wife of the prominent New York philanthropist Eliot Pratt.[19] She was a contact of Aleksej Sokirkin, First Secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. for Soviet intelligence, which was cultivating Mrs. Pratt as a conduit to the First Lady.[20] Mrs. Roosevelt played matchmaker for the couple[21] and they began an affair.[22] By 1944 Lash had divorced Nancy; with the First Lady's support and counsel,[23] Pratt divorced her husband and married Lash.[24]

HUAC

In 1939, Lash and other ASU leaders were summoned to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities on Communist influence in student organizations. On the train to Washington, they met First LadyEleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Roosevelt counseled Lash and the others on how to handle themselves before the committee. As a witness in the hearing, Lash gave evasive answers, refusing to acknowledge Communist control of ACU.[25] He reportedly mocked the committee chairman, Martin Dies (D-Tex.), singing:

The First Lady "electrified the Washington press corps by appearing in the hearing room as a gesture of moral support to the witnesses."[27] At first Mrs. Roosevelt sat at the back of the audience knitting, but when Lash began to falter under questioning, the First Lady arose. "She moved to the front of the committee room so that [Dies and committee members] would be more respectful in their questions," according to Roosevelt biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook. "She sort of came to [Lash's] rescue."[28] The First Lady later told one of Lash's companions that she could not understand why Lash had seemed "so uncertain in his replies" to the committee's questions. After the hearing, Mrs. Roosevelt invited Lash and his comrades to the White House for dinner.[29] Lash began a correspondence with the First Lady,[30] who invited Lash alone to the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park, N.Y. She once brought the President by to hear Lash's views on American youth.[31]

Attempt to secure a commission

Throughout the duration of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Lash had been an ardent pacifist, fomenting student anti-war strikes and attacking ROTC as "a vast propaganda effort to make the war system... colorful and appealing." Even before the pact, in 1937, Lash had written:

“

American youth does not intend to lay down its life in shell holes around Shanghai or Timbuktu. The program of the American Student Union states that 'we will not support any war which the United States Government may undertake' for we recognize that such a war would be imperialist in character.[32]

”

Gertrude Lash with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Lash was identified by Venona project investigators as an American citizen who cooperated with KGB intelligence. Mrs. Lash later served on the Foundation Board of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library.

But following the breakdown of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Lash tried to get a commission in the U.S. Naval Reserve, with the backing of Mrs. Roosevelt. When he was turned down, the First Lady intervened on his behalf, asking the attorney general "if it would be possible for you to run down for me through the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Colonel Donovan's Naval Inspectors and the Dies Committee, what they really have on Joe Lash."[33] After Pearl Harbor, Lash was drafted into the Army.

Eleanor Roosevelt was responsible for involving Lash in FDR's presidential campaign of 1940 as the director of the Democratic National Committee's Youth Committee. In time Lash became one of the First Lady's most trusted advisers.[34] In the early 1940s, the extraordinary relationship between Lash and Mrs. Roosevelt led to rumors that the two were romantically involved.[35]Washington Post columnist Westbrook Pegler was apparently referring to Lash and his ex-wife, the former Nancy Bedford-Jones, when he wrote in 1942 that an acquaintance of the First Lady

“

formerly was a fair haired boy of the Communist Front, married a young campus cutie who has been infected with the Moscow principles and celebrated her marriage with a piece in a Muscovite paper, entitled "My Father was a Liar" was divorced, and now, at the age of 32, is held up to the American people by Mrs. Roosevelt as a person fit for leadership of American youth. He, also, is on Mrs. Roosevelt's private payroll, the money for which is derived from the commercialization of the Presidential office.[36]

”

Mrs. Roosevelt responded by asking the FBI to investigate Pegler for "sedition."[37]

G-2 surveillance

In a 1943 Federal Bureau of Investigation memorandum, George C. Burton, Chief of the Liaison Section of the FBI's Division V (National Defense),[38] reported to FBI Assistant Director Mickey Ladd that Colonel John T. Bissell, Chief of the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) of the War Department's Military Intelligence Division[39] relayed to him a report from Colonel Leslie R. Forney, Chief of the Military Intelligence Service's Counterintelligence Group (CG),[40] that—pursuant to surveillance of Lash—CG had bugged Lash's room and obtained a recording made one night when Lash and Mrs. Roosevelt shared adjoining rooms at a Chicago hotel. The FBI surveillance report "indicated quite clearly Lash and Mrs. Roosevelt engaged in sexual intercourse."

Gen. Bissell relayed to Burton a report from Col. Forney that news of this recording had leaked to the White House. Forney and General George V. Strong, Assistant Chief of Staff for G-2[41] (Army Intelligence),[42] were summoned to report to the White House "with the complete records of this matter" at approximately 10:00 p.m. They were received by the President, Thomas E. Watson, Executive Officer of the Division of Plans and Policies, and top FDR adviser Harry Hopkins—whom Ishkak Akhmerov (the leading NKVD illegal in the United States)[43] identified as "the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States,"[44] according to Oleg Gordievsky, the highest-ranking KGB officer ever to defect.[45] According to Bissell, Forney and Strong played the recording:

“

This recording indicated quite clearly that Mrs. Roosevelt and Lash engaged in sexual intercourse during their stay in the hotel room. Forney advised Bissell that after this record was played Mrs. Roosevelt was called into the conference and was confronted with the information and this resulted in a terrific fight between the President and Mrs. Roosevelt.

”

According to Burton's memo, Bissell said he subsequently learned that "the President had ordered that anybody who knew anything about this case should be immediately relieved of his duties and sent to the South Pacific for action against the Japs until they were killed."[46]

Shortly thereafter, Bissell replaced Strong as Assistant Chief of Staff for G-2,[47] and the CIC was ordered to cease its domestic investigations, to destroy its investigative records, and to ship its agents out to overseas theaters.[48] The reason, according to Gen. Willard Holbrook Jr., chief of CIC, was that one CIC investigative report had proved "personally embarrassing" to "certain powerful politicians" who were "high in the Roosevelt administration."[49] According to New Mexico State University historian Joan M. Jensen, "The 'embarrassing' information involved the surveillance of Eleanor Roosevelt and her friend Joseph P. Lash..."[50] The official history of the CIC states that the speedy dissolution of the CIC “left little doubt that someone—possibly Communists who still held key positions in government—was determined to halt CIC investigative activities in the United States.”[51]

↑David E. Pitt, "Joseph P. Lash Is Dead; Reporter and Biographer," The New York Times, August 30, 1987. The late M. Stanton Evans was skeptical, however, often quipping, "There are things even the strictest party discipline cannot make happen."

↑On November 5, 1943 the Army ordered all CIC agents out of Washington, D.C. The following day, the Army Inspector General submitted a devastating report on the CIC. In February, 1944 the position of Chief, Counter Intelligence Corps was abolished and CIC Headquarters was dissolved. General Background, History of the Counter Intelligence Corps (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), pp. 68-74